Portrait and trees
2.5 hours, pencil on Stonehenge paper
This drawing. Ugh. The drawing is off, the values are a mess. I tried to unify things a little after I got home, but it's just... I've been in a bit of a funk this week and I'm trying to figure out why. It seems like for me, a depressive spell is often caused by fear with no place to go.
When I was super depressed a couple years ago, I felt panicked, like I was running out of time. I looked at my life and realized I wasn't doing everything I wanted to do. If you had asked me at anytime (after about age 16) about my bucket list, one of the first things that would have come to mind is "have a painting hanging in a museum." It's just always something I've wanted to do. But I never had the how in the equation, so I didn't even try to do it. I saw no way I could get there. I wasn't naturally gifted enough--in my mind there was just no way I could ever achieve it. I accepted that and I gave up--until I just couldn't ignore it anymore. The past little while I've gotten closer to understanding the how. I've found people who have the answers I lack, and I feel really fortunate to be where I am right now.
But despite that, I've been getting that panicky feeling again lately. I hate that panicky feeling. It makes me just want to squirm all over. I want to be really good at this. I'm not a person who does things halfway. I can get a little obsessive about things, actually. And right now, I feel like there's a ticking clock on my progress (the atelier I'm attending is trying to move to Paris). It's not even rational (feelings rarely are, right?). Certainly there are other avenues I can explore. But how I feel right now (no matter how much I try to tell myself otherwise) is, "you have 6 months to learn what you need to learn." I know that's not possible. Nobody learns this stuff in 6 months. Nobody. Not the most gifted people in the history of the world have learned it that quickly. So I guess the fear that I haven't successfully licked yet, is that I run out of time, and then I just flounder on my own for a while until I find some sale-able shtick, and live out my days making paintings that 100 years from now people will stop to look at (if they stop at all) and think, "Hm, interesting phase in the evolution of art," when what I want is for people 100 years from now to stop when they see my paintings and say, "Ohhh." Just that genuine, heart-dropping, "ohhh". You know?
Anyway, all that to say. I'm not where I want to be and I want to get where I want to be. And it seems like a pretty big mountain to climb. And I wish I didn't have to keep fighting the same mental battles over and over, but I just do.
I ran across this quote the other day, and I keep reading it. Be a tree, be a tree ;)
"For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfil themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves.
"Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.
"Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.
"A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.
"A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.
"When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.
"A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one's suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.
"So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness."
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